


The Steel Hooks that Stay Honed Sharp and Shiny

by silenceinmolasses



Category: Original Work
Genre: Asexuality, Blank Verse, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Metaphors, Other, POV Second Person, Poetry, Self-Insert, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 21:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2244048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silenceinmolasses/pseuds/silenceinmolasses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Too-personal, warm and as sticky as spilled cream poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Steel Hooks that Stay Honed Sharp and Shiny

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Poppy Z. Brite’s “The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire”. 
> 
> May or may not become a series.
> 
> Please enjoy!

1) Refuse to accept the body in the mirror. Plainly refuse to acknowledge that this heaviness on your chest or the round flesh on your hips or the softness on your chin belongs to you.

It’s on your body but it’s not yours.

Your body is made from peaches and roses, with eyes hid under a blanket of licorice lashes, and there’s sweetness in the back of your throat when you try to scratch it all off your face. It feels too much like paint.

Refuse to answer any questioning gaze. Eat your lunch, read your book, force your veins to extend far enough to entwine themselves into crooked buildings on your way home. Find a minute of peace in empty windows and overgrown kudzu bushes. Refuse to think what peace means to you.

2) Don’t look in the mirror. Don your armor while acknowledging how pretty the ceiling is today. Call your ceiling a “she” and promise to love her forever. Glimpse in a mirror for a second, just to see whether you have toothpaste on your lips. You usually have.

You have trouble inhaling deeply in your chest binder; simply turn the page over in your book. Still do not find anything useful.

We have a handful of words and disgust for our bodies and we somehow have to make sense of it.

You pretend you want to find a person in your bed: a person who would call you beautiful in a way that wouldn’t make you want to cut your tummy to see whether there’s light inside (there probably is).

You wait for the bus, imagining how they would mark your thighs with rubies and their fingers taste like milk.  
After coming home and seeing an empty bed you smile relieved.

3) Put on your favorite T – shirt (which color of the deadly sins is it?), ignore your hair and surprise yourself. There’s wind playing in the flowers on the windowsill and you don’t feel especially dysphoric. Eat a peace of chocolate, chew more openly than necessary.

Put on a vest for a good measure. The mirror is too close and yet you can’t see your stubble. You suspect your happy trail isn’t any better.

Call it all transport while realizing how hypocritical it sounds.

Take out the trash and be more yourself meeting the neighbors you see for the first time than when you are naked.


End file.
